Vented Uplift Community Blog

I have often wondered whether I am anything like my mother in the positive attributes she had. I know that my tongue is fierce, my judgment swift, and my tastes fine, but what about the deeper things? My mother had a penchant for friendships that have seemed to elude me over these years. I thought myself broken and incapable of making friends and that lasting friendships were not my thing. I realize now that it was my trauma of losing those I loved that caused me to push others away who mattered to me the most. So if anyone who is reading this feels I did this to them, I am sorry. I grew up without that guiding light that we need well into our 20s and even our 30s and 40s if we are so fortunate. I can only hope to be that for William all the way throughout our lives. My mother had this light about her when around people and had a penchant for saying the right thing, telling the right story, and had a laugh that I have tried to mimic and have failed out over the years. I envied tha...

Remember the game of telephone? Yes, that game! The fun one you played when you were little. Can you see it in your memory? Everyone sitting in a circle, and the first person thinking for a few seconds about what to say, and then suddenly they began whispering into their friend's ear. She would giggle and then pass the message on to the friend next to her. Everyone patiently waiting for their turn to receive the message. Sometimes, the anticipation was too much and giggles were unleashed. As the message went from mouth to ear, we knew almost definitely the content was going to get distorted, garbled, and transformed. That was the fun. To hear in the end, how the original message became an entirely new message. Most of the time this grand unveiling was met with lots of laughter, because it was always so far off from the original phrase and many times, made no sense. And we enjoyed the game. We played it over and over. What we may not have understood at the time, is that we were teac...

At 57, I feel as if I’ve lived countless lives with changing titles; daughter, sister, girlfriend, wife, mom, PTO President, business owner, entrepreneur, survivor, real estate agent, and author. Each title brings me back to moments and lessons learned throughout my life. Some bring bright, lingering smiles, some tears. But, every memory is of me being a woman who was needed almost daily, and a constant in the lives of others. When my daughter went off to college, I braced myself for the empty nest symptoms I heard so much about. Like menopause, empty nest syndrome seemed to come with a very long list. Yes, I cried when I dropped her off at college, but her almost daily calls helped us to quickly fall into a new rhythm. When she returned to attend law school in NJ, I thought I was one of the lucky ones who bypassed all of those symptoms. She was back, and she still needed me to be her biggest support. Whether school-related, heart-related, or career-related, somehow I knew I could prov...

This is what I want you to do: tell someone you love them, and dinner's at six. That's the tagline from one of my favorite memoirs on food and entertaining, Bread and Wine, by Shauna Neiquist and this, I believe, is where the good stuff is found. In 2011, I went to visit my grandma in California for the last time. Each morning I’d drive to the hospital, and then each afternoon, I’d walk back out into the parking lot—the one with the little rose garden--and all I ever wanted to do after a day spent there, with its beeping machines gray hospital beds, and smells of plastic, was to gather friends around a big table and pass heaping bowls of food. To eat and drink and laugh into the fading evening light and celebrate—well, nothing more than simply being alive. In fact, it’s the first thing I did when I got home. A call went out to friends, and just like that we were on my deck back in Colorado, filling glasses of wine and eating grilled salmon with lemons and arugula and parmesan s...

Sarah, my 18-year-old daughter, came home from work early today with a terrible stomach ache, vomiting, and severe nausea. When I found her, the poor darling was curled up in the fetal position and laying in bed. She was miserable. As a caring mom, I wanted to help her in the best way possible. Did I run for the Pepto? Did I dash for the Immodium? No, I sprinted for peppermint oil. In a case of nausea without vomiting, I would have made a cup of peppermint tea, but instead, I handed her my small bottle of peppermint essential oil with instructions to take deep inhalations. Additionally, I combined peppermint oil with a carrier oil (oil used to dilute the essential oil) and had her apply it topically on her stomach and lower GI areas. Guess What??! It worked like magic! After about 30 minutes, she was sitting up in bed, fully relieved of nausea and cramping, amazed at what the oil had done for her ailment. “Peppermint is wonderful for nausea,” says Lauren Richter, DO. Its calming and n...